Infobip: Mastering the 2026 Shopping Season: A CX Leader’s Guide to Evolving Consumer Demands
Infobip — 2026 — Customer Experience
Infobip's 2026 shopping season survey finds shoppers planning earlier and demanding more relevant, fast, and consent-driven interactions, requiring CX and marketing leaders to shift from last-minute campaigns to proactive, segmented outreach beginning in Q3. The research highlights strong channel preferences (email dominance alongside rising use of messaging apps), significant consumer willingness to share data for value, and tight expectations for transaction speed and support responsiveness—factors that elevate the importance of unified customer data platforms, consent management, and measured AI deployments. Regional differences and governance requirements mean enterprises must localize timing, channel mixes, and privacy practices while enforcing SLAs and human escalation paths for AI-enabled support to preserve trust and reduce churn.
Key Statistics
- 88% of respondents prefer email for promotional campaigns
- 25% of shoppers want holiday promotions in October or earlier
- 66% of shoppers are willing to share product preferences with brands
- 48.4% of shoppers expect order confirmations within one minute
- 72% of shoppers prefer a clear, non-pre-ticked checkbox at checkout for marketing consent
Key Takeaways
- Begin holiday campaign planning in Q3 and proactively segment early planners using behavioral signals (wishlist adds, browsing, historical purchases) and offer exclusive early-bird incentives.
- Adopt an omnichannel operating model that assigns explicit roles to channels (e.g., email for discovery, SMS for urgent updates, messaging apps for conversational support) and integrates CRM, marketing automation, and messaging platforms.
- Invest in a unified CDP and centralized consent management platform to enable real-time personalization tied to explicit consent, improve data quality, and reduce unsubscribe and complaint rates.
- Implement transactional SLAs and support metrics (e.g., confirmations within 60 seconds, MTTR targets <5 minutes), and deploy AI chatbots for routine tasks with clear escalation to human agents and regular red-teaming for bias and accuracy.
Cite as: Infobip. (2026). Infobip: Mastering the 2026 Shopping Season: A CX Leader’s Guide to Evolving Consumer Demands. Retrieved from https://research.agilebrandguide.com/reports/infobip/infobip-mastering-the-2026-shopping-season-a-cx-leaders-guide-to-evolving-consumer-demands